Sarah Crowner "Paintings and Pots"

Transforming the legacy of hard-edged geometric abstraction, specifically from the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Victor Vasarely, Lygia Clark, Olle Baertling, Bridget Riley), Sarah Crowner employs both original and appropriated compositions as patterns and templates to construct paintings that exist as hand-built objects. Using a sewing machine, painted panels of canvas are sewn together with blocks of monochromatic fabrics and raw linen, thereby reconstructing and reducing the rigorous systematic approach established by the specters of Modernism.

Crowner further investigates the history of Modernity through the juxtaposition of these paintings with freeform hand-built ceramic vessels that oscillate between traditional craft and sculpture. Taking cues from the new ceramists of the mid 20th Century, Crowner retains simplicity with her neutral palette, modest scale and organic forms. Unglazed, hollowed out and bottomless, these pots form relationships between the veracity of cultural objects and the formal constraints that surround contemporary art.